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TWO LOVERS ESCAPING IN THE UNDERGROUND WORLD

Roma A.d. 2006

(versione italiana di seguito)

The Smart car cut through the air like a flaming arrow, down Beniamino Franklin’s avenue. In its tightly squeezed interior, the Chemical Brother’s “Hold Tight London” boomed at max volume, almost shaking C’s four-wheeled automatic toy.

Window down, his elbow held out in a plastic pose, a cigarette hanging from his lips, dark shades on at night, his head lolling to the rhythm of an hypnotic beat, sunk into the passenger seat — P had the world at his feet, just like a young man who has lived every instant of his life without a precise goal other than to live to the fullest, digging into each experience in search for the strongest emotions. Now, inside that car, shooting towards another story to tell, love, sparked all the more by the sense of the forbidden, injected the right dose of adrenalin (just above the levels recommended by the ministerial protocol), which inebriates you and stirs the cool air of a late March in Rome.

A possible external observer, leaning distractedly on the trunk of a parked car, would have jolted, noticing the car’s imminent crash into the restaurant on the cornet of Galvani street. With an expert, sudden swerve, C nonchalantly entered the piazzale on the side, slowing down to find a parking spot, zigzagging across the multi-ethnic, illegal parkers.

“Wait, wait! Don’t turn it off ‘till the song’s over!,” P burst out, once she had parked. He had always hated interrupting the enjoyment of a song listened to at max volume. That sudden silence was like a coitus interruptus, a more-than-annoying landing back onto reality, after an exhilarating musical flight. Once the song was over, they handed over two euros to the invasive, let alone useless, parking watchman, and headed towards that very restaurant whose window they were about to go through at 80 km/h.

A beige, veal-skin, spike-heel shoe touched the cobbled ground before the ex-slaughterhouse. Then C got out of the car: She was stunning, her legs tight into a pair of classic jeans with extremely low waist. A black low-necked t-shirt under a leather jacket left a large portion of young cleavage in contact with that near-spring evening air, so typical of a late weeknight in the capital, when the humidity of the Tiber river is still close. The vague scent of animal droppings, also typical of that piazzale, instantly brought into P’s mind the memory of countless crazy nights, concerts, alcoholic rambles and parties and music of all kinds, from 80’s-themed to house nights, which he had spent in that area.

The owner’s daughter, a close friend of C’s and an accomplice of the adulterous act that was taking place, had placed them on the upper floor of the restaurant, safe from indiscreet glances or unexpected visits.

The dinner was an ode to Roman cuisine, perfectly executed. First came the carciofi alla romana (Roman-style artichokes). These winter flowers are cooked, in Rome, in the traditional way like this or alla giudia, according to the Jewish tradition. Crammed facing downwards onto a blend of water and oil, they are emptied of their thorny inside, which is replaced with minced anchovies, parsley, fresh mint and breadcrumbs. Each bite was a hug of oily softness, that left a pleasant, slightly sour aftertaste, typical of artichoke. After the appetizer, they brought the wine, which indeed could not have been matched with the artichokes: a Montepulciano, with its fruity notes, warming the soul with its wooden scent. This tour of wonders went on with a carnevalesque arrangement of tomatoes, grated pecorino and crunchy pork-cheek lard, the latter two being the absolute protagonists of Roman cuisine, tangled up with durum wheat mezzemaniche, which literally means “half-sleeves,” a cylindrical shape open on both ends to better host the sauce — in this case, the amatriciana.

Wine poured down from the chalices like the talk of a coke-addict at his first line of the night. The cook had decided to hook them by the gut, with a moving culinary revival. The scottadito lamb ribs came in triumphant through the hall, like Caesar’s chariot on his glorious return from Gaul, followed by Vercingetorix in chains – the stir fried chicory, crunchy ecstasy of wild chlorophyll. The seared ribs, which C abundantly sprinkled with lemon, were enough to grant Nirvana by means of plunging one’s teeth into the hot fat, which was crunchy on the outside, and soft, yet not towy, inside. The lamb’s clearly detectable flavour was in part tamed by the chicory, sweetened by garlic, spiced up by chili pepper, and sour by its own virtue. P thought that, as a last meal for the sentenced to death, one could not ask for any better. Their stomachs were nearly stretched to the max, by if P and C wanted to leave the restaurant without dishonoring a Capitoline table, they could not abstain from eating a generously large slice of ricotta pie: a soft, fresh magma of mixed ricotta (cow and sheep), spangled with chocolate tears, resting lazily onto an airy pastafrolla (short crust). Those bites of sweetness fell into the digestive tube causing the effect a love letter may produce in a shy adolescent, lubricated all the while by sips of aged grappa. It was not simply a dinner, but a stamp of awareness of their own roots, a reminder of belonging never to be forgotten, despite, or rather precisely in sight of their imminent departure, in who knows which foreign lands.

Their belly full, their pride rejuvenated, they were ready to go. P took a pack of smokes out of the zip pocket of his white-and-gold jacket. In the plastic envelope around the pack were four blue pills, each with a Superman symbol imprinted on both sides.

“Swallow it, come on, we’re going dancing,” he told C, placing one of the pills upon her tongue. Once out of the restaurant, they dove into the air of a Roman friday night, charged with expectations, and proceeded as though floating in the midst of the alcohol’s vapours and the drowsiness of their heavy digestion; the blue pills having landed on top of a pile of divine food, waiting for their turn to be digested. The ex-slaughterhouse area bustled with night venues and clubs, the walk towards their destination was therefore quite short. The two seemed to have forgotten their clandestine status, their brain unable to perceive the danger, pleasantly drowned as it was in the Montepulciano. The crowds of young people around them, hurrying towards different clubs, did no longer seem threatening to their eyes, and the paranoid impression of being followed and watched had temporarily abandoned them.

They walked up the entrance of a club called Fake, not far from Radio Londra, where they were hosting a night of house music. They blended with the nameless crowd on the dancefloor, abandoning their will to the bass that pumped out of the speakers. P took out another blue Superman pill, placed it on his tongue with a catlike motion and, kissing C, passed it over to her. They swallowed the remaining two pills, with a sip of gin lemon (mostly lemon with a little gin, typical of the homage drinks that are included in the entrance fee).

As it often happens, the digestion was sudden and abrupt, like geyser rode by Superman, bursting millions of hot-cold microparticles inside their bodies. But suddenly, in the midst of their soundwave ride on the centre of the dancefloor, C caught sight, among the crowd, of two of the young men her boyfriend had hired to watch over her, while he was in jail. They saw her, but she wasn’t sure they had understood that she was there with someone else. Panicking all the more under the influence of the psychotropic substances, she did the worst thing she could have done: instead of moving away from P, she grabbed him and, with a silent shout, unable to compete with the DJ’s frequences, she yelled:
“LET’S GO!!”

She dragged her benumbed P across the dancefloor, toward the closest exit she could spot. What she believed to be a perfect lucidity, regained in the moment she detected the danger, was actually prompting in her anxious and disconnected reactions, which worsened the situation. The two men, in fact, had noticed C’s sudden reaction at the sight of them, and had thrown themselves through the drunk crowd, in a wild chase. The two fugitives walked heavily out of the security exit, but, finding themselves above a slipshod metal grill without any railings, fell down in the void below, precipitating in the darkness for an unknown lapse of time.

What is this toxic powder, I’m blinded and inebriated. I take a deep breath. There is something melt for us in the air. We are baked – stoned. Like a horde of mad ants we cross the stream of the Beat, leaping over imaginary boulders, shiny and cavernous pulsations that rise like bursts of scorching magma. We are underground, but what does it matter. The opulent pigs up there live in a sunless land, anyway, under a sky obscured by the very same clouds that emanate from their own madness of restless production. They keep getting fatter in their artificial steel worlds, soaked in unnamable sewage, holding on to their wealth, which is useless at this point. What’s a capital for in a dead world? Having nothing left to buy, they bought out one another, like cockroaches devouring each other: the bigger eats the smaller, the stronger the smaller, in a desperate, downward scuttling towards hell.

They buried us under a layer of garbage, but who cares? The useless artifacts that year after year they vomited over our heads has formed a mile-thick blanket that pushed us lower and lower. But, the fools don’t realize that in this way they’ve created a wall no sound can penetrate, thus depriving themselves of the holy Beat, the pulsating throb emanated by our King’s bowels for us – his sons, his tentacles, the mouths that suckle his incessantly his nipple dripping electronic nectar. The pigs up there, they suckle each other, like cancer feeding off of its own putrid cells. Down here, we vibrate as a single mass, penetrated and impregnated by his Beat, boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom, always faster, more elastic, dense as hot seminal liquid, dumb, blind, deaf and vibrating all at once.

We’re here, we’re many, like quivering larves, in this dusty, dusky ecstasy, breathing as though we’ve just popped out of water. Our pirouettes are almost epileptic as we sweat with orgasmic shivers, our eyes closed and full of light; sunk in non-existing worlds. Blue streaks, azure particles, Virgins in adoration, laser tubes brimming love, an immense love, towards everything and everybody, unconditional, exasperated, to the limit of collapse. Our feet crave vibrations. Our fingers seek soil in which to sink, called back by the divine Beat that He is sending us from his cavern beneath, the inverted peak of mount Olympus from which the only God, the only King we have, gives shape to sounds to feed his children, gives birth to those basses from which we all depend
boom boom boom boom boom boom boom

without rest, without release, deep beats overwhelmed by cacophonic howls, metallic remembrances of love, words that have since disappeared, uttered in a trance out of his centuries-old memory.

I catch a sight of holy monkeys, called back from the depths of our world, writhing in an asymmetric circle: it’s the sign that the King is coming up. They hold a privileged communication with him. They are awaken from their constant slumber from incalculable distances, and they gather in our arena to welcome His coming. The swarm of bodies in a frenzy gets larger and larger. The red-haired monkeys clutch restlessly to the bodies around them, penetrating them with their erected sex, producing ecstatic orgasms the human mind can’t even conceive, and flooding with hot ice human shells that are close to reaching the absolute Nirvana. The impregnated bodies close themselves up, incapable of absorbing such a power, crumpling up only to explode like nuclear comets full of love, their eyes rolled backwards, their jaws shut to the point of merging.

The Beat is rising. Soon the King will be here. The ground throbs with dizzying implosions. Perhaps we’ll soon collapse into King womb. The ecstatic vortex is whirling faster and faster. Our joints snap with our almost unnatural movements, squirmed by overly stimulated muscles that almost prompt our limbs to leave the body.

Almost at the zenith of the love-wave released by our uniform mass of crazed children, blue flames of human auto-combustion tear apart a darkness that no one looks at. The monkeys have now gathered in a perfect circle, and like shepherd dogs, they’ve driven out His sheeps, leaving an immaculate void in that infected mass of stoned human bacteria. With its electronic liturgy, the Beat is about to become human. Laser frequencies hiss left and right, bending their heads towards the ground. Monstrous, beloved roars echo through our bones, starting from the toenails of our bare feet, climbing up our shinbones and whirling in our kneecaps. The roaring vibrations traverse our femurs, reaching our tailbones, sliding up our spine like snakes made of ice, vertebra after vertebra, until they explode our huge, wide-open craniums where, for on instant, the whole cosmos seems to fit in.

boom boom boom boom boom boom boom the speakers’ power seems almost to let out the sound in solid form. Below us, the ground shakes to the rhythm of his Beat, jolting us. The arena is rent in the center of the void generated by the holy monkeys’ circle. The blast wave hits us, along with His repetitive metallic chant, accompanied by the speakers that we love more than our own selves. The opening in the ground widens. The monkeys tighten up in a single unit, their tense muscles form an impenetrable barrier.

Here He is.

The King rises from his circle, his body stretched, quivering and throbbing to the rhythm of His own Beat. Imprisoned by his 360° console table, he is raised from the platform higher and higher, above our adoring heads. His hands glide rapidly between knobs, his back is bent to the point of breaking, turning the roar of his soul into sounds for us, his lost children, buried under miles of plastic and greed. His eyelids hide white bulbs, buried deep into a big shiny head, patterned with with electric filaments that give off bronze refractions, from which telepathic pulsations are sent to the console. The chant of his torn soul is translated into vicious Beat, reaper of silence. An overflowing river of basses destroys the dam of desperation, crushing us with electronic love. Our bodies, drenched with sweat, shines among the silvery lasers, shot from the console, giving us the image of a huge metallic fish bent over the mixer, throbbing with panic for the absence of oxygen. Omen-like contortions to the rhythm of his Beat.

The arena is engulfed by a divine catharsis. The bodies, overwhelmed with love, pirouette in a concentric vortex to the sound of a metallic dirge, their arms outstretched towards the console, towards the King. The soundwaves merge with all of our ventricular beats, delivering us across the river of fear.